The 'art' of photoshop

[philip j. trott]

Hello all,

As a beginner to photography, I feel as though the majority of great shots

posted by accomplished photographers are more PHOTOSHOP ART than anything

else. Is this where photography is going? I've seen so many incredible shots

that look more like a painter's canvass than an actual photograph. In other

words, do I need to master Photoshop in order to create great images? I tend

to go the 'amateur' route and simply add saturation to many of my shots. But I

don't know how much to add, or if I should be adding saturation at all? It also

probably doesn't help that I am a little colour-blind ha ha. Perhaps I should

just convert all my shots to B & W :)

I use a Nikon D80, by the way. Any thoughts on this would be greatly

appreciated.

Thanks,

Phil

[jbeach]

Hey Phil, as a beginner, maybe I shouldn't be giving out any advise, (I have questions posed in lots of different forums), but- I say that you should "tweak" your photo as much or as little as you like! I have Photoshop 7.0 and I rarely use it,other than when I want to take someone out of one photo and place them in another. Now granted Photshop does have some really helpful tools, I have managed to salvage some photos that other wise would have ended up in the recycle bin, they were either too underexposed or overexposed and things like that. ultimately at the end of the day it is YOUR art, your vision of how that person, or place looked, how it spoke to you.

[graybrick]

Post processing is all a part of it. Even great film photographers use(d) darkroom techniques, many of which have photoshop equivalents, to enhance thier final print images. Even that Adams guy would tell you that the darkroom process is crucial to the final product. It all starts with great photography, but what comes out of the camera is a raw material which must be produced into a finished product, and this often involves manipulation of some sort, from exposure tweaking with contrast/dodging/burning to completely reworking an original image or creating a collage/composite, etc. The raw product is essential, but not the end of the process.

[michael_darnton1]

Phil, perhaps the problem here is that the pictures YOU PERCEIVE--the ones that appeal to YOU--as being the best are the ones that are heavily Photoshopped, and are mistaking that for a general preference. Just as birds like shiny things and no one mistakes that for sophisticated taste, I suspect inexperience photographers do, also. A lot of the stuff I see that's glitzy just looks cheap to me. The photo.net galleries are particularly loaded with bling masquerading as art.

[michael_darnton1]

One of my favorite threads, where the inexperienced photographers totally and repeatedly miss the point of a great photo:

[colin carron]

Phil, I suggest you should do what seems right to you and don't worry about post-processing if it doesn't appeal. There is no right or wrong here only taste. (Though people who disagree with me have very poor taste!)

 

You will certanly not be alone and many here prefer to keep post-processing to a minimum. However it is fun to master PS (which is analogous to the printing stage of wet photography) and see what it is capable of. That way you then know how to use it and when to draw the line so that your shots don't end up looking glitzy and cheap.

[cooltpmd]

IMHO, there have always been 2 seperate, but inseperable skill sets in photography. "Picture taking" (composition, exposure, focus, etc...) and "Pre/Post-processing" (media selection, developement, burning/dodging, color vs. B&W selection, painted corrections, etc...)

 

It is a truth that post-proccess can forgive many "sins" of a problematic photo ... so it is common for a "purist" to poo-poo proccessing as only needed by bad photographers. Some will argue that no final photo can ever be considered completely "un-proccessed".

 

It is also true that (and more so with Photoshop than ever) ... a good photo can be made an interesting, purposeful work of art.

 

I have found that I take some good and bad pictures ... I have inconsistent photoshop results ... and I have produced good and bad final results. This is, of course, relative to me, the only person I can control.

 

I actually like taking photos that I will barely touch ... they stand as a photos .. no more, no less. Maybe art, that's a whole other argument.

 

But I have discovered the ability to "mess" with an occassional photo and form a "digital art work" that I like. I can't draw/paint well ... so this is actually a new world that I am exploring.

[Leonard-just-Leonard]

PhotoShop cannot fix composition.

 

Unless of course you start adding and removing what was there to start with.

 

Take well composed shots, and do minor touch ups in PS and you too can make great shots.

[ellis_vener_photography]

"Is this where photography is going?"

 

It may be for SOME photographers -- but not for all. Stop lookign at online galleries and start goign to museums and art galleries and looking at magazines.

 

"In other words, do I need to master Photoshop in order to create great images?"

 

Master it? No but you do need to learn how to make this very flexible and capable tool do what YOU want to do. In my opinion the best digital darkroom work is not at all obvious: you see what is in the photogrpah, no tthe technique.

 

"It also probably doesn't help that I am a little colour-blind ha ha"

 

Than learn to work in monochrome.

 

Thomas Powell left out the most important "skill" set in photography: Seeing.

[ellis_vener_photography]

correction:

 

Thomas Powell left out the most important "skill" set in photography: Seeing what could be in what is.

[geoffs1]

Well, no thread on the evils of "Photoshopping" can exist without mention of the poster-child example of pre-photoshop manipulation: "Moonrise over Hernandez".

 

There, that's taken care of...

[michael_darnton1]

And then there's one of my own favorite photographers, W. Eugene Smith, but the difference with both Smith and Adams is that they did what they did without making it totally obvious that they'd been messing with things. For instance, for about 20 years I didn't realize the saw in this picture was added in the darkroom: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/full/smith/smith_schweitzer.jpg

[kelly_flanigan1]

Jeepers; there was a time when "enlarging"; "dodging"; "burning in"; "contast control"; even "flashbulbs" was considered "messing with the image"

[jay_hector]

The transparency shooters, especially with Kodachrome, did/do the least processing as they had/have no choice. I know as I was a T-Man (with magazines), and I shoot digital like one too. Over-expose, under-develop to bring out the shadow detail with print film, and digital allows you to do the same thing by exposing to the right on the histogram -- nothing wrong with this at all. If you could have tweaked Kodachrome I would have been the first to do it, but you had to get it right in the camera or pretty much you were doomed whether you liked it or not. As I said, I shoot digital as if it were transparencies, and it keeps the processing down to a minimum. I had a laugh when I looked at the flicker thread linked above by Michael Darnton on a Cartier-Bresson shot. The complaints about the blurred bicycle and one particular complaint about how did he know the bike was going to be there are classic. I had just about the same exact complaints from readers over <a href="http://www.jaypix.com/pix/aust.jpg">this shot</a> of mine from Road & Track. If one sees a wide-angle shot at an F1 race with no fencing, guardrail or any advertising of any sort, then you blur the cars so you can't read their advertising either, not because you are an idiot and used too low a shutter-speed.

[michael_darnton1]

As far as I'm concerned, as soon as you decide to put the camera up to your eye, excluding some of the surroundings, you've messed with reality. :-) And how anyone could claim a flat, unmoving, silent image on paper has any real claim to being unmanipulated reality. . . well, I don't get that at all, either. :-) I would say that there are only the issues of appropriateness, taste, effectiveness, etc., in the manipulation.

[ricardo_tomasi]

Phil, take a look at the images in this thread: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00PGYV

 

No processing. Now try to do something like that :)

[matt_needham]

"Is this where photography is going?"

 

It's just going around in circles. It's all been done, and argued about before.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism

 

Some quotes from H.P Robinson's book "Letters on Landscape Photography" published in 1888:

 

"...it is not easy for the new generation of photographers to understand the difficulties through which the beginner of thirty years ago had to grope his way. To a modern dry plate worker it would be like listening to a foreign language if I told him of some of the difficulties of the collodion process. What does he know of comets, oyster-shell markings, and lines in direction of the dip?"

 

"The lens is always considered the most important of all the tools the photographer employs. So it is, but I should like to say boldly that, within limits, I do not care what make of lens I use. It is as well to have the best your means will allow, but there has always been too much made of particular variations in the make of lenses. It has been the fashion to think too much of the tools and too little of the

use made of them. I have one friend who did nothing last year because he had made up his mind to buy a new lens, and could not determine whose make it should be, and he was tired of his old apparatus. His was of the order of particular and minute minds that try to whittle nothing to a point. I have another friend who takes delight in preparing for photography, and spends a small fortune in doing so, but

never takes a picture."

 

"...what difference a knowledge of how a picture was done should affect in the Art value of that picture I never could discover."

 

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=h%20p%20robinson&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Peach_Robinson

[philip j. trott]

Thank you to everybody who took the time to provide your very valuable feedback. This is the first forum post for me and I was thrilled to see the responses. It only goes to show how supportive this community is.

Phil :)

[don_e]

"...the majority of great shots posted by accomplished photographers are more PHOTOSHOP ART than anything else. Is this where photography is going?"

 

Yes. That is because it requires additional steps to convert a digital file into a negative to make it more DARKROOM ART, and very few photographers see any advantage to doing that.